Total Quality Management
Total quality management (TQM) describes a management system wherein a company attains organizational advancement through a commitment to customer requirements. A company meets those requirements when it empowers every employee in every department to maintain high standards and strive for continuous improvement. Total quality management is the predecessor of many quality management systems, such as Six Sigma Lean, and ISO.
Quality Management
The application of a quality management system in managing a process to achieve maximum customer satisfaction at the lowest overall cost to the organization while continuing to improve the process.” Quality management has four parts:
- Quality planning
- Quality assurance (defect prevention)
- Quality control (which includes product inspection and other elements, such as competence)
- Quality improvement.
Statistics play an integral part in quality management because being able to predict accuracy through numbers is much less expensive than inspecting parts. Moreover, sometimes inspection is simply inconvenient. “McDonald’s needs to know that every burger is right without having to take a bite out of each one,” says Nichols.
Total Quality Management Principles
No single accepted body of knowledge exists for total quality management, as does, for example, the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) for the Project Management Institute. Similarly, no prescribed actions exist for implementing TQM methods and tools. Organizations have been free to deploy and adapt TQM as they see fit, giving way to many definitions of the methodology. Despite these challenges to standardization, it’s possible to describe generally accepted principles:
- Customer Satisfaction
- Employee Commitment: This creates empowerment through training and suggestion mechanisms.
- Fact-Based Decision Making: Teams collect data and process statistics to ensure that work meets specifications.
- Effective Communications: There should be an open dialogue throughout an organization.
- Strategic Thinking: Quality must be part of an organization’s long-term vision.
- Integrated System: A shared vision, including knowledge of and commitment to principles of quality, keep everyone in a company connected. Taiichi Ohno recognized that even suppliers are an important part of the system.
- Process-Centered: You can deconstruct every activity into processes, and, therefore, locate and repeat the best process.
- Continuous Improvement: Every employee should always be thinking about how to better perform their job.
Importance of Quality management to organisation
- Ensure customer satisfaction and customer loyalty
- Ensure increased revenues and higher productivity
- Reduce waste and inventory
- Improve design
- Adapt to changing markets and regulatory environments
- Increase productivity
- Enhance market image
- Eliminate defects and waste
- Increase job security
- Improve employee morale
- Reduce costs
- Increase profitability
Costs of Quality
There are four primary cost categories:
- Appraisal Costs: Appraisal costs cover inspection and testing throughout the production cycle. This includes verifying that the materials received from the supplier meet specifications and ensuring that products are acceptable at each stage of production.
- Prevention Costs: Prevention costs include proper setup of work areas for efficiency and safety, and proper training and planning. This type of cost also includes conducting reviews. Prevention-related activities often receive the smallest allocation of a company’s budget.
- External Failure Costs: This category concerns the cost of issues following a product’s market release. They may include warranty issues, product recalls, returns, and repairs.
- Internal Failure Costs: Internal failures are the costs of problems before products reach customers. Examples of internal failures include broken machines, which cause delay and downtime, poor materials, scrapped product runs, and designs that require rework.
Implement of Total Quality Management.
“Plan: The planning phase is the most important. That’s where management, along with the associates, identify the problems to see what really needs to be addressed — the day-to-day things that may be happening on the productivity side that management is not aware of. So they’re trying to determine a root cause. Sometimes, employees do research or high-level tracking to narrow down where an issue may originate.
Do: The doing phase is the solution phase. Strategies are developed to try to fix those problems identified in the planning phase. Employees may implement solutions and if a solution doesn’t appear to work, it’s back to the drawing board. In contrast to Six Sigma, it’s less about measuring gains and more about whether the employees judge the solution to be working.
Check: The checking phase is the before and after. So after you’ve made these changes, you see how they’re doing.
Act: The acting phase is the presentation or the documentation of the results to let everybody know, ‘Hey, here’s how we were doing it. Here’s how it is now. This is the new way, and this is what this should address going forward.’”
The Seven Basic Tools of Total Quality Management
According to the experts, the basic tools of TQM allow anyone – even someone without statistical training – to gather data to illuminate most problems and reveal possible solutions. Here are the seven basic tools of TQM:
- Check Sheet: This is a pre-made form for gathering one type of data over time, so it’s only useful for frequently recurring data.
- Pareto Chart: The chart posits that 80 percent of problems are linked to 20 percent of causes. It helps you identify which problems fall into which categories.
- Cause and Effect Diagram or Ishikawa Diagram: This diagram allows you to visualize all possible causes of a problem or effect and then categorize them.
- Control Chart: This chart is a graphical description of how processes and results change over time.
- Histogram Bar Chart: This shows the frequency of a problem’s cause, as well as how and where results cluster.
- Scatter Diagram: This diagram plots data on the x and y axes to determine how results change as the variables change.
- Flow Chart or Stratification Diagram: This represents how different factors join in a process.
The Key Players in Total Quality Management: Customers, Suppliers, and Employees
To achieve success with a total quality management program or any other improvement methodology, managers must understand the quality goals for their product or company. They must then communicate those goals, in addition to the benefits of TQM, to the company, as employees play a vital role by contributing their intimate, day-to-day knowledge of product creation and processes.
TQM is a philosophy that values comprehensiveness. Therefore, suppliers are a crucial part of TQM execution. Companies must vet new suppliers and regularly audit existing suppliers to guarantee that materials meet standards. Communication with suppliers about TQM goals is also essential.
Customers are the most significant part of the TQM equation. After all, they’re the reason for TQM’s existence. Aside from the obvious feedback the sales team provides, customers — product or service users — give information about what they want from the deliverable, whether that deliverable is tangible or a service.
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